WEBVTT

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[Ideas that transform]

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(Music)

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(Applause)

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Thank you. You are very kind.

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I'm not that techie.

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I don't have a tablet, yet.

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This being said, I'll call to my tech side

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and present you my notebook.

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(Laughter)

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This notebook has been with me
for many, many trips

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and... this is the pen
to touch the notebook's screen.

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It's wireless, as you can see, very updated.

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When I was proposed
to speak in front of you,

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besides being glad
and flattered with the idea, I told them:

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"What should I speak about?
It's about sharing experiences, right?"

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And then, an interview
that Bacanal magazine

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did with me recently crossed my mind.

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It's a magazine about bon vivants,
about drinking expensive wines,

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and eating in opulent restaurants.

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The reporter titled the interview
"Living From Air".

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And I was really surprised,
because I suddenly understood that,

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everything I did during my life,

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or at least in the last
40 years, was to live from air.

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Right? Literally living from air,
because everything I do, is air.

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It doesn't exist.
Can't be seen, can't be touched.

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It's an idea, and an idea
is like the air, right?

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When we think, our ideas are not
in any specific place,

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they are "over there", in our minds.

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That's the imagination.

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It's the imagination of the others
and the words,

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which carry the idea through the air.

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What I do in radio can't be touched,
can't be seen, but still,

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you end up seeing it in the mind,

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in the imagination of those
who are listening to the radio.

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This is why I always compare
the radio with literature,

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because a book is the same,
even though it is not air.

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It's paper, and it's ink.

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But we all read the same book.

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For instance, that novel which
may be written in another language,

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but the words are the same,
from the same author,

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black ink over white paper.

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Identical, equal, similar.

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However, the image that is being
formed while reading that novel

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is completely different
in each one of the heads reading it.

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It's full of subjetivity.

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It's about our experiences,
it's about our hard drive,

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it's about what happened in our lives.

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So we imagine the same
in a personal way, in a different way.

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And that's radio, right?

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It's words, is air.

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Words that travel through the air,
sounds that travel through the air.

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And depending on who we are,
our background,

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the way we live and the culture we have

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and what we've learned
and the parents we had...

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we are going to handle it differently,

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and we are going to include different images.

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small or big differences, but different.

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So I think: "Wow!
This guy could summarize

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with the words "living from air"",

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what I've done all my life, right?
Which is, living from air.

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Living from this that can't be touched.
The radio is air, is imagination,

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is ideas.

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If I remove the people from the radio,
only antennas, transistors, disc players,

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mics would be left.

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But nothing would happen.

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We must put humanity in it,
we need to put people,

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we need to put ideas and imagination,

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and there in the air, the images
take shape and the speeches appear.

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Everything we listen to everyday appears.

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So then, I also think that the idea is air.

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I mean, radio is a concept, is ideas.

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It is someone who's thinking
and saying things,

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or playing a guitar, or singing songs.

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And that's it.

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Radio is just that. It's pure sound.

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We can't add color,
we can't add odour.

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It is just people speaking,
people thinking, people with ideas,

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and I thought that the idea
is also a bit similar to air.

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And what gets the radio going,
which is the idea and the imagination,

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is also what keeps our lives going.

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Let me propose this exercise now:

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I've been 40 years on radio now,
so I'm a well-known professional,

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more or less respected... sometimes.

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So why am I on radio?

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What exploded inside my head
in order for me to spend more than 40...?

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Did I want to work on the radio or not?

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I ended up on radio because one day,
Fernando Bravo

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came back to San Pedro
with a brand new salmon-colored Peugeot.

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(Laughter)
(Applause)

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That's the original idea.

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(Applause)

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That's the first idea, and
I later painted it carrot-color.

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Right? Because it's just like
the carrot and stick.

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The car was that.

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It took me a long time
before I could buy a new car.

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And it wasn't
salmon-colored, but carrot-colored,

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because it took me
to the radio and I felt in love with it.

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With this radio that can't be seen,
this radio where everything is possible.

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Where any story is possible.

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Where I can make a
Spielberg movie with no dollars.

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Because special effects are sounds
and we can even make them with the mouth.

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So I fell in love with this radio,

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this radio that you can't see,
because of that idea of the new Peugeot,

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because we, who worked
in San Pedro's radio, thought:

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"If he can, we can, too."

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So the idea transports you,
the first blow,

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when you think about pursuing it.

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That is was we need to do,
we must not lose it.

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Get hold of the idea, and go after it.

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The radio is a display
of one senseless idea after another.

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Marconi didn't invent the radio
in order to make the radio we know today,

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Marconi wanted to send
wireless telegrams

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that could reach the ships,

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because the navy, the war,
the armies needed it.

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Just two points joining:
"beep, beep, beep, beep",

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and they were sending Morse.

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They wanted to take the wire off,
so they racked their brains

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to find a system to transmit the sound,

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"beep, beep, beep, beep", and
then they decoded the morse code,

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and they listened wirelessly, unplugged,
for instance,

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off the shores in the deep sea,
on the ships.

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The first guy who transmited voice
over the radio that made "beep, beep"

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was a radio operator who was
at the NYC port, just messing around.

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There were mics already.

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This device existed, too,
so the guy thought:

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"What if I connect the mic
to the beeper, to the beeper wires,

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and instead of going "beep, beep", I speak?"

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So he said: "Hello!"

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Can you imagine the shock
every radio operator on the ships got?

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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Nobody had ever talked to them
through the radio; radio didn't exist yet!

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And all of a sudden, not only did he
speak and read the Bible, (Laughter)

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but he played the violin
and really shocked everybody.

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It would be long before the radio turned
into the kind of radio that feeds me

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from the air, and this thing
that I live from air.

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Many times kids come to me and ask:

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"Has tech, Internet and PCs
changed the radio much?"

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The truth is they haven't.
Radio is still the same:

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a mic and some moron saying stupid things.

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Or in many cases,
saying serious things, OK.

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But I mean, the greatest evolution
in the radio, the greatest change

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was the transistor radio. Why?

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Another idea,
that had nothing to do with it.

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The guy who invented the transistor
didn't know that it was going to trigger

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the making of a really small radio
that we could carry in our pockets

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with a set of headphones

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and that we could listen to 
the match at school, or at work.

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In 1930, the transistors were created
and all that

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but it was only in the '50s
when the transistor radios appeared.

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In other words, just the same way

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Fernando Bravo's car was a carrot,
an idea,

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an idea that gets inside of you,
and you search and look for it

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until the idea is fully developed

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and someone can make it possible.

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Nowadays, we listen to music
on our smartphones or MP3 players,

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for me it is the same concept
of a transistor radio, nothing changed.

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The really cool thing was that
it wasn't plugged to a power supply,

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because it had a small battery

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and you could carry it in your pocket.

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Then the walkman appeared.
A copy of the transistor radio.

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And then the MP3,
a copy of the walkman.

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And now the smartphone,
which is all that together but....

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what is that, really?

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A small device that sounds in your ears.

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For me, the biggest challenge, maybe,
technologically speaking,

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in that thing of the ideas,

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might be the rebirth of the cell phone.

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The cell phone is
the most democratic thing on Earth.

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I've just heard a woman
complaining on the radio, saying:

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"Hey, the poor people take the money

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and the first thing they buy
is a cell phone."

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I understood the real democracy
of the cell phone

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on a my way to dinner with friends,

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when I went by a group of poor guys
collecting paper,

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and one of them was talking
on a cellphone:

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"(beep, beep) I'm loading the stuff,
please send me the truck."

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And I said to myself:
"This is huge.

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They had no way
to communicate before."

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The cell phone is absolutelly amazing
and yet we haven't found a use for it.

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Maybe, that idea, the one
that transforms, like the transistor,

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like the guy messing around
who connected the mic to the wire.

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Maybe that is the idea missing if we want
the cell phone to stop being the device

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with which the companies get
their revenue, and start being that device

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that helps fill the holes in our society,
sometimes far away, sometimes close,

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here, in Argentina.

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Education, for instance,
and many, many other things.

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Living from air,
is the demonstration that,

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to listen to the radio,
we don't even need an antenna,

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we don't even need the transmiter,
we don't even need the idea.

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In 1980, I traveled to Marocco.

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In Marrackech, at Jamaa el Fna square,
I saw some guys standing on the benches

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and they were speaking to groups of people.

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One speaking to 10 people,
another to 5, and then,

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one guy speaking to a group
of 80 or 90 people.

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(Imitating Arabic)
They spoke and people listened,

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and every now and then,
the people dropped a coin and left.

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My guide was an Italian
who spoke some Spanish, so I asked him:

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"What is he speaking about?"
So he says:

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"The guy is broadcasting the news,

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because almost everyone here
is an analphabet.

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So he listens to the news on the radio,
retells it publicly and gets a few coins.

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And then I understood the term "rating".

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One had 5, the other had 100,

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and I asked myself why, if they
must have listened to the same station

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and were telling the same things.
So the guide said:

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"Yes, but the one with 80 people
listening to him

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also tells jokes and gossips."
(Laughter)

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So, radio is so much living from air,

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that you can make radio
without a radio, just with people.

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I found it totally wonderful.

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I'm not denying technology,
the hardware,

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I'm not denying everything
we get from it everyday.

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Absolutely not.
I was one of the first PC fans.

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When the first Commodore 64
appeared, they made us learn

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not just how to use it,
but also how to program it.

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I started with Basic, then they wanted
to make me learn Cobol,

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which was impossible to understand.

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And then, when the first sound editors
appeared, the first digital editors,

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I was among the first ones
uploading the tapes

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and starting with PCs,
I kind of got addicted to PCs.

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And then I said: "OK, this is enough,

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I'll use them just for work,
and the rest of my life

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can be written in this notebook,
which might not be a tablet,

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but is a nice composition notebook.

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It can keep all my ideas,
and in case of a blackout,

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I'll be able to read it with a candle.

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But, going back to living from air,
and our talk this afternoon,

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we need to keep in mind that ideas rule.

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We might have computers,
but what is going to lead our lives

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is our ideas and our own imagination.

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Ideas rule.

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They always did, they do now,

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and they will rule
in every machine in the world

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which will join together to kick our asses.

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The idea of a lone thinking man,

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the idea of a man thinking
when lights go out,

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a man thinking when nothing's left.

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The idea is the real thing,
the idea makes us different.

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The idea is ours, and the idea is nothing.
It's in the air, is pure imagination.

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It's like a cosmic nonsense in our heads,

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and if we use it right,
it will get us that job

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that 10 other people already applied for.

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Who are they going to hire?
The one who thinks better.

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Or, in any other aspect of life:

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Who is going to get there?
The one with the best idea.

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Now, if you have good ideas,
if you exercise your imagination,

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if you work hard, everything that is
just going around in the air

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with curiosity, willing to play,

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and, on top of that,
you have a few computers...

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Then, you are ramping up your speed.

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I could say that nothing will stop you,

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but, if the computer takes over you
and you let it do it...

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you'd be in trouble.

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Because the day the computer
takes over, it turns your brain off.

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I've learned that living from air.
Thank you very much.

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(Applause)